Taverner Press

Waste Land | David T. Hanson

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Waste Land

David T. Hanson

Preface by Wendell Berry

Afterword by Jimena Canales

Essay by David T. Hanson

176 pages, 136 color plates

Clothbound with jacket

9.8 x 12 inches

ISBN: 9780692046074

In 1980, from more than 400,000 toxic waste sites throughout the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency declared 400 of these highly hazardous and in need of immediate attention. In just a few years, the number of these “Superfund” sites more than tripled. Though they constitute a shocking degradation of our landscape, Superfund sites are never seen by most Americans. But over the course of a year, beginning in 1985, David T. Hanson traveled to 45 states on a Guggenheim Fellowship to make aerial photographs of 67 of them, documenting a cross-section of both U.S. geography and its ravaging by industrial waste in one artistic odyssey.

Hanson’s Waste Land series, published here in its entirety for the first time, is a master photographer’s meditation on the country’s most dangerously polluted places. Each work in the series juxtaposes the artist’s photograph with a topographic map and the EPA’s own description of the site’s history and hazards.

Although the photographs were made over thirty years ago, they seem even more relevant today, given our growing concerns about energy production, environmental degradation, and climate change. As Wendell Berry describes in his moving foreword, “Hanson’s art is here put forthrightly to the use of showing us what most of us, in fact, have not seen before, do not wish to see now, and yet must see if we are to save ourselves and our land from such work and such results. He has given us the topography of our open wounds.”

Trade Edition$55

USA orders only*

Special Edition

David T. Hanson, Colstrip, Montana; Wilderness to Wasteland; and Waste Land

This special edition is comprised of signed and numbered copies of Colstrip, Montana; Wilderness to Wasteland; and Waste Land presented in a custom cloth-wrapped slipcase in an edition of 50.

$500

USA orders only*

For orders by mail and international orders, please contact us at orders@tavernerpress.com

No refunds, returns or exchanges on all orders.

David T. Hanson website